Yes, I know it’s a Beta release, but…

• We all know that “Beta” has a special meaning for Google, and besides…
• Google’s Beta products and services are usually quite better than others that claim to be stable or mature.

On January of this year, I shared with you some facts that show that it takes Google no less than a year since it releases a new product for Windows to having a version of the same product running on Linux (see “Google, are we second-class citizens?“). The 1.0 release was launched on December 11th 2008. 362 days later, Linux and OS X users finally have a native beta for their respective platforms.

I’ve tried it on Debian Lenny, and I have to say that I’m really pleased and that it runs wonderfully. So, for those of you that are done with Firefox’s bloat and subpar performance, now you have the choice to run a modern, lightweight, reliable and extremely fast open source web browser.

The only bad news is that we’re still second-class citizens to Google, and that doesn’t seem likely to change in the near future. Now that we have Chrome… where’s the Google Talk client for Linux? 4 years and counting…

Defined tags for this entry: browsers, chrome, firefox, floss, foss, google, linux

Posted by Marcus Friedman

New Releases in the OSS world

• VirtualBSD

  It’s not actually a new member of the BSD family, but an interesting way to try it out if you’ve never had a chance to run an xBSD operating system before

• nftables

  A new firewall for the Linux kernel — an interesting development, although it’s still in an early Alpha stage.

• Linux Kernel 2.6.29 (see the full changelog)
• Mono 2.4 This is a release focused on stability and performance, but it is also the foundation for Novell’s own long-term support Mono-based product.
• MonoDevelop 2.0

  Continue reading "Featured News and Articles [ March 2009 ]"

  Posted by Marcus Friedman

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  Last modified on 2009-04-17 15:10
  

When you need to distribute documents in PDF format, you’ll probably want to protect them. If you are working on Mac OS X (or Windows) and you have Adobe Acrobat, that can be done quite easily.

But if you’re running Linux on your desktop —or even if you’re using Windows or a Mac and don’t want to use proprietary programs—, there are free tools that will let you protect your files by adding encryption, passwords and restrictions.

One of those tools is pdftk (the pdf toolkit). On Debian and Ubuntu, pdftk is already present in the official repositories, so all you have to do to install it is:

apt-get install pdftk

In the product’s website you’ll also find binary packages for FreeBSD, Mac OS X and Windows.

Here are some examples that show you how to use the program:

• Encrypt a PDF using 128-Bit Strength (the default) and withhold all permissions:

  pdftk mydoc.pdf output mydoc.128.pdf owner_pw foopass

• Same as above, except that a password is required to open the PDF:

  pdftk mydoc.pdf output mydoc.128.pdf owner_pw foo user_pw baz

• Same as above, except that printing is allowed (after the PDF has been opened):

  pdftk mydoc.pdf output mydoc.128.pdf owner_pw foo user_pw baz allow printing

Besides the security functions, pdftk has many more features that you might find useful too, including the ability to merge, split and rotate PDF documents, or applying watermarks.

Defined tags for this entry: cool solutions, floss, foss, pdf

Posted by Marcus Friedman

When you have a large movie collection, keeping track of it can become troublesome. Many times you’ll want to watch a movie again, but searching through a huge set of DVDs in order to find it can take a lot of time. Maybe you lent that movie to a friend, then forgot about it, and now you wonder why is it that you can’t find it. Sometimes you won’t even remember the title of the film you’re looking for, but you can remember who was its director, or the name of the leading actor. But then again, conducting a manual search by directors’ names can be quite difficult.

Fortunately, there are many open source programs that can help you to catalog your movies and manage your collection with ease. Building your catalog takes time, specially if you have a large collection, but in the long run it’s time well spent. And after you’re done, you’ll be able to search your catalog in almost any way you can think of (by title, by genre, by cast or crew, by year, etc.) and find a movie instantly.

Most of the video collection managers are desktop-based applications. However, we’ll focus on a web-based product, which can be a bit more difficult to set up than a desktop program, but it has some important advantages, like being a platform independent solution and allowing you to browse and manage your collection anywhere.

Continue reading "How to manage your video collection with open source tools"

Posted by Marcus Friedman